After some fairly extensive googling I seem to have fixed the problem#

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 18:05:25 +0000

After some fairly extensive googling I seem to have fixed the problem on my laptop that makes the clock run too fast. Somewhere in 2.5, the Linux people decided to use the TSC for a time source instead of whatever was previously being used (the PIT, or the 8042, or something). My laptop continuously varies CPU speed to save the battery (and without informing the kernel in any way that I know about, so the CPU_FREQ stuff is no help), which makes the TSC go up and down and round and round, or something. After rebooting with the option clock=pit it seems to be much happier.

Except that /proc/cpuinfo now says

model name      : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping        : 3
cpu MHz         : 0.000

which seems ... wrong. But that's just cosmetic, whereas the clock drift was causing actual problems.